After reading two articles on the Daily-Recap website, it is abundantly clear that the main objective of the Nature Coast Bridge Club is to make money. This is clearly stipulated in the table count essay and the article dealing with having a separate 299er game. The year-end figures bear this out: a 6.2% increase in total tables in 2011 over 2010 and a whopping 97.2% increase in the Wednesday game thanks to the 299ers.

Three club members, Beverly Tillberry, Annabelle Hills, and Gerry Panos, have launched an effort to start a Social Duplicate Bridge Game on Thursday afternoons.  No start date was specified, but an open letter has been sent to NCBC members for posting in their communities or forwarding to their non-member friends.

The letter is directed at bridge players or would-be bridge players who desire a non-competitive but supervised duplicate bridge environment. Lessons will be offered before the game. A charge of $3 will be made to play, and a separate $3 will be charged per lesson.

The game will be sanctioned by the ACBL and masterpoints will be awarded. However, players with more than 20 masterpoints may not play.

Yesterday's combined game illustrates well the effect of using fixed strata when the mix of pairs is unbalanced. Here is the Recap for North-South, with 4 A's, 2 B's, and 6 C's:

Running a bridge club is a business and should be managed according to good business practices.  When our clubs merged in 2009 and started paying almost $2000 per month rent and table set up, it became a bigger business.  We rented the clubhouse for 265 days a year which works out to be about $92 per day.  From Jan through Dec. that year, we averaged:  Tues: 7.88 tables; Wed: 6.3 tables and Thurs: 4.46 tables per game.  The table count dropped during the last quarter.  Faced with diminishing revenue from the Tues, Wed, and very low revenue from Thursday, the board tried to find ways to increase income on those days.

We all should understand stratification. It's used in most ACBL games, and allows for three sets of winners.

Each of the three strats is a group of pairs with similar levels of experience, as measured by their Masterpoints. Players in the "A" strat can ONLY win Masterpoints by beating other pairs in their own strat. Players in the "B" strat can win Masterpoints by beating other B pairs and by beating A pairs. Players in the "C" strat can win Masterpoints by beating C pairs, and by beating B pairs, and by beating A pairs.

Its like 3 games in one, but the C Pairs play in all 3 games at once, B Pairs play in 2, and A Pairs in only 1. 

Theoretically, "A" pairs gain nothing by beating people in a lower strat. "B" pairs gain nothing by beating people in the "C" strat. "C" pairs gain something by beating people in A, B, or C strats.